In Saving Mr. Banks, you play P.L. Travers, who wrote Mary Poppins and who was, like you, an actress and a writer. Any other similarities?
No. She was very troubled. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mom tried to commit suicide, and she had to stop her. I like to please people. She was not interested in that at all.
Travers didn't want Disney to make Mary Poppins because she abhorred the Disneyfication of classics like Winnie the Pooh. What do you say to people who agree with her?
Well, I agree with them. I deplore the Disneyfication of some of it. But then I look at Bambi and I look at Dumbo and Mary Poppins, and I think, You've got to be made of stern stuff to watch those movies. Disney had a very Dickensian childhood. Disneyland was a way of rendering the world a safe place for himself and other children.
You created Nanny McPhee. Do nannies interest you?
The nanny story is essentially the western. It's the stranger from out of town who comes into the situation of conflict, solves the issues using unorthodox methods and then must depart. Shane and Buffalo Bill turn up as Nanny McPhee and Mary Poppins in the female world.
Travers disliked kids. Is there a gap between women with children and those without?
In my experience, certainly. I think there's a patch, I hope for most women, where they don't have to think about children at all, and they can think about themselves and what they want to do. Once you're a mom, you've been split into two people. It's like Peter Pan and his shadow.
You have a teenage daughter. Did she look at your hair in this film and say, "Mum, no"?
Everyone looked at me like an infant woolly mammoth. So yeah, she did. But she's a goth--I do her hair up in spikes. As soon as she became a goth, I thought, Whew, thank God. We're O.K.
In your youth, you dated Hugh Laurie, whom people know as Dr. House.
He was rowing in the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. He was enormous and eating steak all the time. And asleep for the rest of the time.
So, the perfect boyfriend?
He was also very funny.
You told him that when you can't sleep, you picture the men you've slept with. Does that still work?
I haven't done that in a long time. I'm more likely to rehearse casserole recipes, which perhaps is a sad indictment of my state of mind.
If I gave you a magic wand, what one change would you make to the world?
I would destroy and remove the monetary system.
A modest change, then.
The system is a cataclysmic failure.
In the movie, Disney says artists "restore order with imagination." Is that how you see it?
My godfather said that story was about taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
Does your husband Greg Wise ever ask you to dress up as Harry Potter's Sybil Trelawney?